28 March 2013

How many officers would you deploy, if you were in charge of
policing an event where between 300 and 1000 demonstrators were
expected, who, according to the police's own statement, can be
categorised as ''middle-class'' i,
i.e. harmless ? One hundred, perhaps? - remember, you're putting in the
officers in full riot gear, helmets, body armour, metre long
truncheons. That must be enough, that would give you a ratio of one
well-armed, potential combatant to, at the most, every lot of ten
do-gooders. The head of the Hamburg police service, under the direction
of Michael Neumann, Minister for Interior Affairs and Sport, decided to
deploy six hundred and fifty police officers at the official opening of
the IBA – the city's proudest piece of gentrification – in Wilhelmsburg
on Saturday evening. The presence of these six-and-a-half centurias on
that one day has cost the city an estimated €100 000 ii.
A spokeswoman for Hamburg police was unwilling to confirm this
estimate, but also refused to present their version of the costs, even
though the arithmetic involved is simple.

22 March 2013

“If the Duke continues to drink himself
to the point of illness then he will succumb to that illness, and
will not live long, instead of, as he claims, strengthening his body
with the drink ... The Duchess may continue to suppress her current
discomfort, due to her very manly way of thinking. But this
discomfort will turn into sorrow. And will she be able to suppress
that? Luise's [the Duchess's] sorrow! Goethe! -- ... ”

So wrote Hamburg poet Friedrich Klopstock
to Goethe in Weimar in 1777. At that time, Klopstock was still seen
as the fatherly head of all German language writers. Like Günter
Grass today, he had many detractors who enjoyed the sport of mocking
him, and yet nevertheless enjoyed a huge status. Goethe, 28 and
already a famous writer, was making news with his
rugby-player-after-five-pints sort of behaviour together with his
patron & close friend the Duke of Weimar, Karl August. They
slashed around themselves show-offishly on the market place with big
whips, jumped on their horses, and rode through the villages playing
sadistic practical jokes on the locals, knowing these people had no
means of redress against such actions. Klopstock gets to hear of this
in Hamburg and is incensed, it undermines his ideal of the poet as
someone who rises on the sublime above all such iniquities. He also
feels responsible, seeing Goethe as a promising but errant relative
of the family of poets which he presides over. And so the letter
continues:

“Goethe! -- no, do not drape yourself
in that glory, you do not love her as I do .... Up to know the
Germans have been right to complain about their rulers, because these
rulers haven't wanted anything to do with you scholars (=writers).
Your friendship with the Duke takes him straight away out of that
category. But if you continue to dance with the Duke to this old
tune, there's no limit to the excuses the other rulers would have to
make in their defence, [for not being interested in writers], if it
actually one day will have happened, that thing which I fear most?”

Klopstock asks Goethe to show the letter
to the Duke too. Whether Goethe did this or not we don't know, but we
do know that he only answered two months later, in a tone of clear
refusal: “Do spare us such letters in the future”, adding
casually that he'd have no time at all for himself if he responded to
all such letters and warnings.

Klopstock didn't like this not very
veiled insult at all: “And as you even threw my letter into
that category of 'such letters' or 'such warnings' – you express
yourself as strongly as that ­-- my letter, containing the proof
of my gift of friendship, then I declare you not worthy of that gift
I gave you.” i
The break between the two of them was final.

Goethe treated many people badly; and his
response to Klopstock shows him as a careerist, understanding art as
a career-ladder and the necessity of shoving people off the top of
that ladder, to make way for himself. Or, as Yeats puts it in his
poem, The Fisherman: “The
beating down of the wise / And great art beaten down.” If you
translated Klopstock's name literally into English you would get
Knock-stick. Knocking
his stick at Goethe didn't help Klopstock.

For those of you out there who want to get more into the Klopstock feeling, come along to the annual Hamburg "Poetry Slam in a Church" event, to be staged in what's known as the Klopstock-Kirche - the Christianskirche in Altona - where you can even see Klopstock's tomb. My Writer's Room colleague Hartmut Pospiech is hosting the evening (around the 3rd weekend in June.) My biggest question is whether Hartmut will allow sexually explicit or explicitly political poetry in the church - and how the vicar will respond. The fact that this is my biggest question seems proof of an infantile part of my mind, concerned with scandal & smut, a quality of mind that Goethe hung onto for a long long time, well into his late thirties.

i
For the original German version of the quotes from the letters from
Klopstock & Goethe, and for the historical background to the
above post, please see: Friedenthal, Richard. Goethe. Sein Leben
und seine Zeit. Piper, 1996,
Munich. p.190 – 191.

(In
publishing this workshop-translation, I'm making use of the German
"right of citation" or "Zitatrecht". All rights
for the original German text, "Dante deutsch: Die Läutering
(2)", remain, of course, with Mr Buselmeier's publisher,
Das Wunderhorn Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany. I, Henry Holland,
reserve rights for that part of any future published translation of
Mr Buselmeier's poem, which uses my text above.)

Blogs
aren't meant to be finished things. Why should they match the
academic & aesthetic standards that you'd expect from a printed
book on the same subject? As most bloggers aren't being paid, it
would be foolhardy of them to invest too much time in their online
writing.

That
said, here's a snapshot of a poetry & a poet who needs to be
talked about now, before there's time to finish & perfect, time
to smooth him for a chapter in a book. The poet's Michael Buselmeier,
the poetry book could be called Dante's German
in a not-yet written English edition; the German title is Dante
deutsch, and came out last year. The section
of that poetry quoted & translated by me above is a depiction of
the processions for the Feast of Corpus Christi, a religious event
still celebrated with vigour in small towns & villages in
Catholic southern Germany & in Austria. Carpets made from petals,
painstakingly laid out to picture, for example, a smiling Mary
embracing an angel, adorn the ground in front of houses & the
sides of streets. The consecrated bread, the circular host, is
carried in the "monstrance", something like a mini
sedan-chair – covered in gold & jewels with sides open so the
public can see in – & paraded through the towns.

For those of you filled with ambivalence or even antipathy for all things Catholic, the fact that
Buselmeier originally made a name for himself in the early 80s with a
novel in which a left-wing protagonist passionately protects
his threatened urban habitat, may add a twist of lemon to the story
-- (The Fall of Heidelberg / Der Untergang von
Heidelberg, 1981).** On first sight German
Catholicism and the grassroots-left are two worlds which could not be
further apart. But look again, and you will find attitudes &
behaviours shared by the two groups. A commitment to the cause that
goes miles beyond the bounds of reason. A belief that the end (the
triumph of Catholic values or the triumph of left-wing goals) can
justify the means. And a need to do the same thing again and again,
the need for ritual. Parading the streets following a piece of chewy
dry bread, transformed into the body of Christ. To be seen again this
year on the 30th of May. Or the left marching on the 1st of May, same
old slogans, same old beer & sausages; the more energetic among
them staying up to nightfall of that day, when the ritual throwing of
bottles at the riot police, the ritual retaliatory riot police
charge, the ritual sofa burning on the streets of Hamburg & other
larger German cities commences.

** I made extensive use of Michael Braun's article about Michael Buslelmeier, p. 18, issue 3, 2012, of the print edition of Volltext to write this blog post.